Murdoc's Masochistic Max-Difficulty Oblivion Run

[Chevaleresse]

Title's pretty much what's going on. I'm planning on doing a runthrough of Oblivion and narrating my escapades here, but there are a fuckload some details I still haven't decided on.

To explain each option:

Combat/Magic/Stealth are the three divisions of skills within Oblivion. More specifically:

• Combat skills are Blade, Blunt, Hand-to-Hand, Athletics, Block, Armorer, and Heavy Armor.
• Magic skills are Destruction, Restoration, Alteration, Illusion, Mysticism, Conjuration, and Alchemy
• Stealth skills are Sneak, Security, Marksman, Light Armor, Acrobatics, Speechcraft, and Mercantile

I should mention that I will not use Blunt (as blunt weapons are inferior to blades in almost every way, being heavier, slower, and with generally inferior reach, not to mention the availability of powerful blades vs. powerful blunt weapons.) I would vastly prefer Heavy Armor to Light after doing a playthrough with the latter. When I say an archetype, I mean the skills I'll actually use, not necessarily my chosen "major skills" which determine leveling.

Good, evil, or neither is fairly self-explanatory. Good characters don't do stuff like murdering people for their hats. An evil character won't end up accepting as many miscellaneous quests because evil people aren't very helpful. A character played as neutral will do every questline and will kill an NPC if they have a particularly important/rare piece of gear and said NPC is not needed for a quest. (Evil characters also won't do the Knights of the Nine questline because it requires you to be a good little boy/girl/cat/lizard.)

Special rules are possible options to make the game even harder.

• Permadeath is obvious. If you die, you lose.
• Permanent breaks mean that if you allow a piece of equipment to fall to zero durability, you may not repair it. Enchanted armor may still be worn but will likely be worthless.
• Archetype restriction means only using skills within your archetype (plus Acrobatics and Athletics because they're impossible to not train.) So, mages can't grab claymores and fighters won't be throwing fireballs.
• Not leveling optimally means leveling up whenever you can and not necessarily distributing stat points in an efficient manner. (Please don't choose this because minmaxing is the only way to survive this, other than Conjuration spam as Conjuration isn't affected by the modified damage table, so summons deal and take 1x instead of 1/6 and 6x damage.)

There are a few working item duplication exploits in Oblivion. The main reason I have no issue with using them personally is that gold is only relevant for the purposes of maintaining your gear early game (and good gear almost never spawns in shops), and certain items are very hard to find more of (e.g. Black Soul Gems, Varla Stones.) You also can't duplicate weapons and armor, generally. The real purpose I'd duplicate for is to have a nice house, particularly Frostcrag Spire so I could use custom spells without having to go ALL AROUND THE GODDAMNED COUNTRY to get admission to the Mage's Guild.

With that, I just have one last question. Interested?

[Shadow Tack]

interested. also you should totally do a mage that only uses fists run, that'd be fun to read/watch

[Chevaleresse]

you fucks i told you that minmaxing is the only way to survive unless i just cheese everything with conjuration

So uh, who else is actually interested?

[Aurorix]

This seems pretty interesting. Quick question though, aprox. how big are you update posts going to be/plan to be

[Red_Chaos]

:< use glitching only to finish quests :<

[Chevaleresse]

This seems pretty interesting. Quick question though, aprox. how big are you update posts going to be/plan to be

Depends on how much I get done, really. I've never done this before so I don't really have a baseline, but you'll probably get a description of everything I do (even if it's fucking around in a dungeon or spending twenty minutes trying to climb a sheer cliff face.)

[Tringus]

Yay, another person who plays Elder Scrolls games!!! Anyways, there are indeed many item duplication glitches. I don't know about the one for money, but I know how to duplicate items to sell them for money. However, there is also a way to duplicate Sigil Stones, which allows you to duplicate some that have the Chameleon enchantment, if you want to make yourself 100% invisible. This would certainly help make your quest a little easier.

[Chevaleresse]

Eh, 100% Chameleon kind of defeats the purpose of the difficulty rating, since the game is actually programmed for it to be impossible for an NPC to detect you (unless they have Detect Life, possibly, but I've only run into that one once and I wasn't at 100% so not sure.) You can literally walk around in broad daylight and punch guards to death and no one will notice. I have the outfit (random cuirass+enchanted amulet+Ring of Khajiti+random ring giving 120%) in my current non-uberhard file and it's just dumb. I only use it for killing stuff like Grummites that can't really kill me but have unreasonable amounts of HP.

As far as the one for money, it's pretty much "duplicate expensive thing, sell expensive thing repeatedly" until you have enough cash.

[Tringus]

Ahh, okay. That's generally what I did too in terms of money. There was one time which I actually did resort to using the 100% Chameleon effect, but that's only because I had no choice but to almost start all over again, which I will elaborate on.

One thing I will say is that when you go to the Shivering Isles, be EXTREMELY CAREFUL when speaking to both priests about which duke/duchess to replace. When I first played Oblivion, something somehow screwed up, and when I went to talk to Sheogorath, he told me "You haven't spoken to both priests!", when I clearly spoke to both of them already! I tried fixing it, but nothing worked, so the only thing I could resort to was going to an earlier save file. I had already beaten the main story and the Knights of the Nine, so you can see why I was extremely salty about making this decision. That glitch was so game-breaking, I had to resort to an earlier save. When I did that, I actually decided to set it to the easiest difficulty with 100% Chameleon, because I did NOT want to do everything again the same way as I did the first time, especially the last quest in the Thieves Guild when I had to steal the Elder Scroll... *shudders* (Zombies and wraiths everywhere... Not a pleasant combo)

So yes... When you get that far in the Shivering Isles, make sure to speak to both priests properly. Trust me, after I got actually got past that part the second time through the game, you can already tell I was doing this as soon as I beat the Shivering Isles, too:

...Along with screaming and ranting "I AM THE MAD GOD!!!"